A lifelong comedy fan spends a week at Marty’s, a bleak Hollywood comedy club that specializes in open-mic stand-up.
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Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. Amor Prohibido Jeff Winkler | Texas Monthly | Aug. 20, 2015 | 36 minutes (9,000 words) Twenty years after Selena’s death, devotion […]
Posted inNonfiction
Space Art Propelled Scientific Exploration of the Cosmos—But Its Star is Fading Fast
The huge, hidden cost to severing the bond between art and science.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Are We Done Hating Television?
NPR’s Linda Holmes, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
All Comedy Will Be Canceled: How the BBC Prepares for the Eventual Death of the Queen
The last death of a Monarch was in 1952, and the BBC stopped all comedy for a set period of mourning after the announcement was made. The Daily Mail reports that the BBC plans to do the same again today, cancelling all comedy until after the funeral.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How McLovin Was Cast From a Camera Phone Headshot
[Allison] Jones began her career with the two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of the nineteen-eighties, but, in working with Feig and the director Judd Apatow, she was required to try something revolutionary: find comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, could improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page. […]
Posted inQuotes
The Selfies of Poets
At LitHub, Kate Durbin presents several dozen selfies–not her own, but those of contemporary poets, like Eileen Myles, Luna Miguel and Dodie Bellamy.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
Angela Carter on Myth and Deception in Hollywood
Angela Carter’s short story “The Merchant of Shadows” first appeared in The London Review of Books in 1989. Set in Hollywood, the narrator is a young, male student conducting research on a famed but mysterious director. The story bends and twists, ricocheting between dark comedy, deep camp, and Carter’s signature surreal, Gothic sensibility. Carter was an ardent fan […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
The Fierce and Misty Flood: Barbara Comyns on the Quiet Seduction
Barbara Comyns’s novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) follows the doomed marriage of two young, bohemian artists during England’s Great Depression. The excerpt below is a simple, gentle seduction; I love the way in which the protagonist, Sophia, swiftly and casually dismisses her husband and her own sense of identity. The scene strikes me […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Stephen Colbert on How All Late-Night Shows Are ‘Chopped’
GQ magazine interviews Stephen Colbert, who compares making a late-night show to the Food Network show ‘Chopped.’
